Cloud control to Major Tom: NASA’s space missions are going ‘cloud native’

November 8, 2015 Off By David

Grazed from TechRadar.  Author: Jamie Carter.

"Hey Curiosity, be a pal and move north 10 metres to look at that big red rock, would ya?"  If the revelation that engineers at NASA’s Jet Prolusion Laboratory (JPL) use Alexa to control its Mars rovers wasn’t enough, consider this – its latest missions are conducted entirely using the cloud. Since adopting AWS eight years ago, data scientists at JPL and NASA have been on their own journey into the unknown, pioneering the exploration of cloud computing in all-new ways.

 
Curiosity and the cloud
 
For the two live Mars rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, NASA uses the cloud for mission-critical controls. The rovers’ operations are controlled via applications that sit on the cloud, from downloading reports on yesterday’s movements to uploading manoeuvres for the following day…

 

"One of the most common myths is that Mars rovers are operated by joysticks," said Khawaja Shams, Senior Manager, Software Development at AWS, but until recently a software engineer at JPL. Shams was delivering a talk called ‘‪Inspiring Innovation in the Cloud: NASA/JPL and Beyond’ at AWS reInvent 2015 in Las Vegas…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/cloud-control-to-major-tom-nasa-s-space-missions-are-going-cloud-native–1308288

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